Elmo, Cooking, and Smoothie

Reading about Elmo with Elmo Slippers with DaddyHelping Mommy make Play-Doh

Drinking her first smoothie

Emily has started to help me cook in the kitchen. And she loves to help! She stands up on a stool and helps me pour pre-measured things into bowls or helps me stir. The other night she helped me hold and count the cloves of garlic before we put them in the garlic mincer and minced them into the bowl. The last few nights when she's seen me start on dinner she runs over and asks for the stool and says "Emmy cook!" She wants to help!

Emily has had a lot of fun at the gym class that she and I go to on Saturdays. The class does a little warm up activity and some songs at the beginning, then gym time, then more songs and movement and a story at the end. At the beginning of this class, the teacher handed each kid a laminated card that had a picture of an animal that was painted on the walls of the room. The kids were supposed to find the animal on the wall and match their card to it and then make the animal sound. Sounds pretty advanced for kids that are 18 months - almost 2. The kids didn't quite get it initially. Emily had a pig and was near the pig, but it was unclear whether she knew that she was matching or not. Emily's the oldest and none of the other kids seemed to really get it, either. Fast forward to the end, we've gone to the gym and are back in the same room as the beginning. We've sung songs, played with bubbles, and pretended to be different animals. Now it's story time and Emily is chilling on my lap and sucking her thumb. Appears to not be paying any attention and is ready for a nap. The story was about Spot the dog going to the farm. A few pages in, Spot finds a pig. Well, Emily jumps out of my lap and runs over to the wall patting the pig on the wall. Everyone (including me) seems pretty surprised. We clap for her and she sits back on me with her thumb in her mouth. Next page is Spot finding the kitten. Well, Emily runs over to the kitten on the wall. None of the other animals in the story were on the wall, but the other parents and the teacher seemed pretty impressed. I certainly was. The next week in class Emily and another boy happened to be the only ones there. The teacher played the matching game again and Emily and the little boy each got to take 4 or 5 turns matching their animal with different ones on the walls. Now they both seem to get what to do with that. When Emily is at class, she barely says a thing. She is very quiet and observes everything going on. She seems to enjoy it all, but doesn't open up much. In the gym, she practices walking on a (wide) balance beam and jumping off of it onto a small trampoline, she climbs (with a bit of help) a ladder, steps over a bar, and across another wide balance beam and then climbs down the other side, and gets to play in tunnels and try doing somersaults. All in all it's a pretty fun class.

Emily has started calling herself Emmy. This started several weeks ago and now she spends a lot of time identifying who things belong to. We have Mommy's chair, Emmy's chair, and Daddy's chair and we do that for everything!

Emily has started to love pretend play. She pretend cooks, pretends with her baby, pretends with her tea parties. Now she loves to pretend to go bye-bye. She gets her play purse, puts the plastic keys in it with a few other toys and asks for her jacket. She carries the jacket and purse down the hall and says "bye bye, be right back." It's so funny. Then she comes back and says "I'm back!" When she isn't pretending to go bye-bye and we do actually leave the house, she loves to take her purse with her. It usually leaves the house with the play keys, a couple of plastic cookies, and the stuffed Elmo. She's certainly got an idea that she's a little girl.

Emily continues to be quite the talker. She picks up on everything we say. She'll hear a word once and be able to use it in context. At home we are regularly hearing 4-5 word sentences, but they are most understood by us, I'm not sure how many other people can understand most of what she says, but we do at home and that is supposed to be the important thing at this age.

We had leftovers for dinner tonight. Emily had a leftover chicken finger from one night over the weekend that we ate out and some leftover peas. She ate most of the peas and part of the chicken finger when Greg and I sat down to eat. We had a mix of leftover veggies on our plates that included some broccoli. She started getting really excited and asking for broccoli. We think it's great that she chooses broccoli over her chicken finger for dinner!

That is the Emily update for today. I'll try to post her Valentine's Day pictures tomorrow night!